Offer · Technical Due Diligence
The technical read your investment committee actually needs.
Ten business days of senior engineering diligence, pre-deal or post-close. Platform, team, security, cost, and roadmap read in the language your IC already uses. Quantified remediation plan, fixed cost ranges, walk-away recommendation if the honest answer is walk away.
10 business days · $15K-$25K · fixed fee · credited in full against the build if we do the remediation
What the memo covers
A memo, not a redlined template.
Every read produces a 12-20 page board-ready memo plus a raw-findings appendix. Written by the senior engineer who did the diligence, not routed through a partner.
Overall risk rating
Green, yellow, or red on the deal thesis. Three deal-changing risks called out by name with cost-to-remediate ranges.
Architecture read
Data flow, service boundaries, single points of failure, dependency risk, replatform difficulty. An ATAM-style trade-off read of where the architecture bends under the deal thesis, diagrammed, not narrated.
Team read
Key-person risk, seniority mix, tenure curve, culture signals. Who is load-bearing and what happens if they leave inside the hold period.
Security and compliance
Audit posture, sensitive-data handling, secrets management, access controls, incident history. What is a Day-1 problem vs. a Q4 problem.
Cost read
Cloud spend attribution, vendor lock-in, contract cliffs, where the money is going and where it will go once volume grows.
Roadmap credibility
Can this team ship what the plan says they will ship, on the timeline the model assumes. Honest answer, no waffle.
Process
Ten business days, start to signed memo.
Kickoff and access
NDA signed, data-room access confirmed, deal thesis briefing from the deal team, contact protocol agreed with the target's engineering lead.
Read and interview
Code, cloud accounts, incident history, dependency graph, architecture docs, team interviews. Findings logged as we go.
Synthesise and quantify
Findings shaped into the memo. Risk rating, top-three deal-changers, remediation cost ranges, roadmap credibility, walk-away signal if there is one.
Delivery and Q&A
Memo sent, live walkthrough with the deal team, IC-facing summary if you need one, and a first-week playbook mapped for post-close if you go through with it.
Who buys the Read
Three buyers, same discipline.
Pre-deal
Operating partner in a live LOI
You have a target in diligence and the tech is core to the thesis. The read confirms the thesis, reprices it, or kills the deal. Ten business days, memo in your IC pack.
Post-close
Portco CTO in month three
You inherited the platform, the value-creation clock is running, and you need a defensible technical baseline you can take to the board. Read produces the baseline plus a first-year roadmap.
Sell-side prep
Founder preparing for exit
You want to know what the buyer's DD team will find before they find it. Read produces a "friendly DD" surfacing the issues while you have time to fix or reframe them.
Sample findings (redacted)
What the memo actually reads like.
A sanitised sample of the kinds of finding that go in the top-three deal-changers section. No client details, but the grammar and price ranges are typical.
Deal-changer · Red
One engineer owns the payment pipeline end to end
The service that handles 100% of revenue-bearing transactions has one committer on the last 18 months of history. No documentation, no runbook, one production incident he resolved by SSHing into a box at 3am and editing config in place. Departure risk is the deal thesis risk.
Remediation cost: $85K-$140K (three-month engagement to document, add a second owner, and set up incident tooling)
Deal-changer · Yellow
AWS spend is 3.4x what the workload justifies
Reserved instance coverage under 5%, three orphaned RDS clusters, staging environment running production-sized workloads 24/7. Not a walk-away, but the cost model in the CIM is off by roughly $260K/year. Fixable in a quarter with the right ownership.
Remediation cost: $35K-$60K (six-week engagement with an SRE) · Annual savings: $220K-$300K
Deal-changer · Yellow
Roadmap and delivery velocity do not match
The 100-day plan assumes shipping two major features per quarter. Git history shows one major feature per quarter over the last four quarters. Not a lie, but the current team cannot execute the pitched roadmap at current headcount. Either the plan needs to be rescoped or three senior engineers need to be added, ideally before the LOI is signed.
Remediation: Rescope plan (free) or budget $600K/year for three senior hires
Questions PE firms ask first
The honest answers before you commit.
- How is this different from a Big-4 or boutique DD firm?
- We are engineers, not consultants. You get senior operators reading the code, the pipelines, the cloud accounts, and the incident history, not a partner-and-associate model where the analysis is done by a junior. The output looks like what an engineering leader would write for their own board, not a redlined template. And the price and timeline are set before we start.
- What size of company does this fit?
- Lower and middle market. Roughly $10M-$250M revenue, engineering teams of 5-50. Below that we usually cost more than the diligence value. Above that the target likely has an internal function that will resent us, and you probably need a bigger firm anyway. The sweet spot is a target where the tech is core to the thesis but the engineering org is small enough to read in ten business days.
- Can you run this pre-deal, inside a live LOI window?
- Yes, and most reads are pre-deal. We compress to ten business days, work off data-room access plus one engineering call with the target, and hand you a memo commercial and legal can sit alongside on the risk register. If the target refuses engineering access, we can still deliver an external-signal read: hiring patterns, tech-blog history, public incidents, dependency choices, cloud footprint. It is a weaker read but it is a real read.
- What does the deliverable actually look like?
- A 12-20 page memo plus an appendix. The memo covers: overall risk rating, top three deal-changing risks with cost-to-remediate ranges, architecture read, team read, security and compliance read, cost read, roadmap credibility. Appendix has the raw findings, the interview notes, and any code observations. Everything is written in the language your investment committee already uses.
- Do you take a finder or referral fee from the sell side?
- No. We are paid by you, fixed fee, and we have no relationship with the target, the banker, or the CEO before the engagement. If the honest read is that this deal should be walked away from, you hear that.
- What happens if we go on to buy the company?
- You have a first-week playbook the moment you close. The remediation plan we wrote maps directly to a 100-day-style path. If you want us to run it, we do (see Modernise and Build). If you want us to hand it to your operating team or a different builder, we do that too. The read is yours regardless of who executes.
- Do you sign an NDA?
- Yes, we sign either your NDA or ours before we look at anything. Data-room access is on your terms.
Further reading
Before you brief the read.
The checklist runs the same seven-section audit you would get in a full Technical Read, in a form you can work through yourself in an hour.
Free checklist · PDF
Pre-Acquisition Tech Diligence Checklist
40 questions sorted live in the browser, 5 deal-changer red flags, an IC-ready verdict.
Audience hub
For Private Equity
Named engagements, price bands, both-sides-of-the-table framing.
Pillar · Ungated
Operating Partner's Technology Playbook
Close, hold, exit. What good tech reporting looks like.
Case study
Sanctions-compliance platform
Regulator-grade platform now live across 20+ financial institutions.
Industry hub
Regulated-industry diligence
What a Technical Read looks like when the target sits under financial-crime and compliance scrutiny.
Free tools
Run the free tools first.
The same diligence lens as the paid Read, self-serve in your browser. Score a target, then bring us what the flags surface.
Free Scorecard · scored in your browser
Portfolio Tech-Risk Scorecard
Score the target across six dimensions in ten minutes.
Open itFree Checklist · scored in your browser
Pre-Acquisition Tech Diligence Checklist
The 40 questions and five red flags, sorted live in the browser.
Open itFree Scorecard · scored in your browser
AI-Readiness Audit
Whether the AI story in the deck survives contact with the data.
Open itSend Tom a few lines about the deal.
The target, the platform, the timeline. A senior engineer will write back honestly about whether this fits the Read.
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